Week two has been all about online dating and online communities. At first glance you would think these two were the same; that is what I thought at first as well. However, these two are completely different. Was I found most interesting about this topic was that it was so hard for me to understand and come to term with the fact that I had always thought the two coincided. I’m sure I am not the only one who thought this as well.
As much as I just wanted to agree with everyone on the topic at hand I had to look around the internet myself and see if I could figure out if I could find other articles about it that I could learn more from. I decided that to learn more about the genre at hand I needed to look around on my own; this is also going to help in my knowledge and ability to write a little more clearly about my topic. Even after talking to the students in class about how they saw that these two genres could be so different when they were both used online and used to meet people I still felt like I was betraying my own feelings on the topic by just saying “OK since everyone agrees that these two topics are different I will just believe it as well.” I started to ask more questions and go in depth with my discussion posts to ask why everyone thought these topics were not as similar as I had thought. According to a book I found online titled “Psychological aspects of cyberspace: theory, research, applications by Azy Barak online dating sites and online communities are far from similar. I decided to look up more sites and more information online on my own to see if I could find the connection elsewhere.
An online community is everything I had thought it was before; social networking sites like Facebook, chat rooms, games, and much more except without the online dating sites. Online dating sites have a completely different goal than online communities according to the book by Azy Barak. According to this author online dating sites have a different objective when they use these sites as opposed to sites like Facebook. Someone using a dating site would use this to meet new people, connect, and continue to extend relationships offline. Online community sites like Facebook use the site to connect with people that they already know and don’t usually establish offline relationships with each other.
Beginning to read new articles and searching the web myself was really helpful for my learning process of this topic. I struggled trying to understand how two things I had always thought were pretty much the same thing could be so easy for everyone else to understand how different they really art. Online dating sites and online communities are both online; however, they are very different indeed. As much as I just wanted to believe what everyone in class was telling me was the truth, I needed to search and find out for myself and I think that is a very good lesson that I learned this week.
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